Over the last year we have tried hard to bring the best programmers on-board and improve the quality of our problems. I believe and I say with some audacity that we have achieved a part of that goal. We now have the support of the finest programmers from around the globe who are helping us to dish out the best quality of problems for you.

The grapevine has it, that while the quality of our contests has certainly improved, this has also resulted in the level of these contests getting a notch higher and hence there is very little that a novice programmer finds to do in our long contests. We felt that somehow in the process, we have started digressing from our original objective of making a newbie love programming rather than get intimidated. The whole idea of a 10-day contest was to provide an opportunity for every programmer to learn a concept required to solve a problem and get the gratification of solving a problem in a live contest without being bogged down by the constraints of time. Not to forget that all this had to be achieved while being competitive.

To overcome this, we are adding 4 more problems of easier levels to the existing lot of 6. Yes, that makes it 10 problems in every long contest from now on! We believe this will encourage many more novice programmers to come, participate and learn in the process. While we are excited to bring in this change, I am keeping my fingers crossed to see the reaction of people at the top, on now having to solve more number of entry level problems!

It was not a very easy decision for us to take. What this meant was more work for our problem setters, much more work for our problem tester to ensure quality of each and every problem and an increase in our monthly budget. But much more than any of this, the fact that we might be risking upsetting the best programmers to solve more number of easier problems may seem like adding noise to the contest!

However, we feel this change is something that has been awaited since quite sometime now. Hopefully the contest will now have something for everybody. And while we would like to take the credit for this change, it will be grossly unfair on my part, to our awesome problem setting panel who did all the work to help us achieve this. Kudos to all of them for some frenetic last minute effort to bring in this contest for you. Hopefully, you will like it and make our journey into the fourth year much more gratifying.

Please send in your feedback. We really love it. Do not hesitate. Come and participate. We have a few more surprises in store for you! Keep watching this space.

And please, please let us know what you think of this change.

Cheers,
Anup Kalbalia
Team CodeChef.

We are done with our First Cook-Off of the year and it was done in some style by Gennady Korotkevich . There is no denying the fact that his mere presence is enough to overwhelm any contestant (at least the beginners). He wins the Cook-Off once again after some months of hiding from the top ranks. Our heartiest congratulations to him.

dzhulgakov, KADR share the winners steps with him. A special mention for dzhulgakov, who made a fifer without any penalties! Now that’s a Good One.

As has been the tradition, the Cook-Off contained 5 dishes prepared by our very own Chef Anil Kishore before being sampled by the Harsha. A big round of applause for them for bringing out an absolutely mouth watering dish!

And the winners are …

1.) gennady.korotkevich
2.) dzhulgakov
3.) KADR
4.) Romka
5.) shef
6.) raveman
7.) lyrically
8.) anton_lunyov
9.) mikhailOK
10.) aropan

Congratulations to one and all.

Let me try and rewind the contest for those who missed the fun. anton_lunyov, gennady korotkevich and mikhailOK fired the contest up at the start by solving the easiest problems of the lot, COLLIDE within the first 6 minutes. Beyond this there was nothing that remained common among this trio. As more submissions gathered up, 3 problems were solved within the first half an hour of the contest! anton_lunyov led the leaderboard at this time and gennady was close behind him.

A tug of war started for the 3rd place with KADR, Romka, dzhulgakov and raveman all wrestling for it. In between the mayhem, a surprise AC submission came from dj3500 for the toughest problem (FLOORSMV) in the set. It was enough to push anton_lunyov down to the 5th position with other contestants going for the kill.

At the stroke of an hour before the scheduled end of the contest, gennady had his last laugh. At this time, there were very few to have solved 4, let alone all 5! dzhulgakov was the next in line to get the fifer followed by raveman, who with his 5 penalties, barged into the top 3. His penalties brought him down to the 6th position to be overtaken by KADR, Romka and shef till the end. Our defending champion and the winner of the last contest of the previous year, EgorK surprisingly finished at 27th!

A special mention to Raziman TV for his best performance in the CookOff’s. He is the lone Indian in top 20!

The stats for the contest are here:

With this win, Gennady has stretched his lead in the short contest rankings to 4027! Check out where you stand here.

Time for wrapping up the post as writing it is making me feel nocturnal We will be back for our February Long Contest. Look out for this contest as we have some surprise in store for you, ssssh….!

Warm Regards,
Tojo

We successfully hosted the 2012 version of IOPC, presented by IIT-Kanpur, on CodeChef. The contest was a team event and saw a total registration of 844 teams! The contest was won by the team Proof. They managed to solve all 17 problems. Our heartiest congratulations to them.

The stats look overwhelming and we have seen a significant increase in participation compared to last year’s version. Here are some stats for the contest.

Contest Statistics:

The solution booklet for the problems can be found here.

Also I like to mention a special thanks to Pratik Moona, Raziman Tv and Uttakarsh Lath for providing a good problem set (having a whopping 17 problems!!!) and working day in and day out to make this contest a big success. A big round of applause for them.

We hope to host many more such contests. So what are you waiting for? Want to host a contest? Drop in an email to contest@codechef.com.

-Tojo

We are pleased to announce that CodeChef, as a part of our Directi’s Go For Gold Initiative, will be partnering with IIT-Kanpur to bring to you IOPC 2012 programming contest. The contest is open to all and will be a team based contest. Register your respective teams by clicking on this link. Go get started!

The contest duration will be 24 hours from 14th January, 2012 1200hrs to 15th January, 2012 1200hrs.

To be eligible for prizes, the teams need to be comprised of students who are currently registered in some university only. It is not necessary that all students be from the same university. Also, you need to be registered on the Techkriti IOPC website to be eligible for the prizes. The registration for the same is here. For detailed rules of the contest checkout the contest page.

Good Luck for the contest. Hope to see you there.

Tojo,
Team CodeChef

The very first contest of the year has concluded, and we have a tie for the first seven places!

ACRush again leads the pack with the other six top place winners with him. It was a very well deserved first place for all of them. We also have 2 Indians in the Top 10 this time, with balakrishnan_v being one of the top 7!

Congratulations to all of them: ACRush, balakrishnan_v, Fdg, gennady.korotkevich, mikhailOK, triplem, wcgbg

We have a surprise in the top 7 in the form of Fdg. For all those who have been trying hard into getting into the winners list and not succeeding until now, this contest has shown up a good example. Fdg has been active on CodeChef since quite some time now and for the first time he has broken into the top 10! Our heartiest congratulations to him and hope he keeps on improving from here. We are happy to have mikhailOK make a come back to our long contest in a grand way! An interesting fact to note, he also shared the top spot in the last long contest (AUG11) that he had participated.

Now time for appreciating the efforts of those who brought this exciting contest to you. The dish was cooked by our extremely talented problem setters and a very vigilant tester, in spite of this being his first time.We had quite a few first timers in the problem setting panel as well and what a great job they did.

Sergey Kulik, Tomaz Hocevar, Nikhil Garg, David Stolp, Anton Lunyov, Vitaliy Herasymiv prepared the problems while Hiroto Sekido sampled them before they were served to you. A big applause to all of them for this effort.

Now, let us glance through the statistics and before we move on to see the final winners list.

Contest Statistics:

We observe that the participation has slightly gone down from the last time. As always, we are keenly awaiting your feedback on the quality and the level of difficulty of the problems. We will be happy to do anything that can better your experience.

And now, without any further ado, let me announce the distinct winners for the contest:

India:

1. balakrishnan_v
2. rudradevbasak
3. suh_ash2008
4. sharatiitr
5. ashish.pant
6. imagin
7. dudechandan123
8. mukulgupta
9. manishmap2
10. vaibhavabhi
11. mng88
12. calc_saransh
13. mcsharma1990
14. javadecoder
15. yash_coder
16. shettynamit
17. xyler
18. architk
19. bsrkaditya
20. manan

Rest of the World:

1. ACRush
1. Fdg
1. gennady.korotkevich
1. mikhailOK
1. triplem
1. wcgbg
7. komiya
8. skorknure
9. evgentu
10. fmm

That is all from us for now. Congratulations to all, once again.

If you haven’t yet checked out the editorials for this contest, you can do so here.

We’re running a 2.5-hour Cook-off on Sunday, 22nd of January. It begins at 2130 hrs (Indian Standard Time), so be there!

Cheers,
Team CodeChef.

You may have been facing issue with our FB-connect button on the site. These buttons became un-responsive after Facebook updated its APIs. We have updated our code base to align with the new Facebook API and the FB-connect button should start working normally.

Please revert back to us in case of any issues. Our sincere apologies for the inconvenience caused.

-Tojo

We were reported of an anomaly in the test cases for the problem PALIN. The test cases failed to validate the submitted solutions under certain conditions and hence the solutions we getting AC. We have now updated the test cases and rejudged all successful submissions of PALIN.

Some of the successful submissions have been invalidated.

-Tojo

We apologize for the inconvenience caused.

-Tojo

What a way to end the year! All our previous records have been shattered!!!

Let me make this official – this has been our most highly participated Cook-Off till date Also let me break the tradition and first share with you the stats as I am still unable to gulp them.

As you can see, by pure numbers, we have the highest user participation and highest number of total submissions in the history of CodeChef Cook-Off’s (The previous high being 566 users in the fourteenth edition and 3231 submissions in the sixth edition) and by some margin!

Let me congratulate and thank Hiroto Sekido and Shangjingbo for giving us this brilliant contest. Please raise a toast for both Hiroto and Shangjingbo. <claps>

Now, the contest summary! The contest started with a whammy for us. We know this has been a consistent problem since the last few contest with the problem statements not being visible for an initial period. Though we feel embarrassed to apologize again, we can’t help but beg your pardon. We are working hard to solve this problem.

So much for the bad part. After the initial glitch, we got first submissions for CIELAB, which eventually saw 642 submissions. CIEL8STR also saw 216 submissions. These were the 2 problems that most of the participants attempted first. By the time theses they were submitted the leader board was settled and remained idle for some time.

mmaxio made the first kill by solving CIELQUIZ and raised the bar for others. His competitors didn’t sit idle and soon after the leader board kept on tumbling. EgorK ruled the charts till the end by solving 4 problems first.

We, admins, had put our bets on EgorK in the last 20 minutes to win, with the exception Hiroto, who wanted lyrically to take the honors (shhhh). No one was able to solve CIELWALK till the very end and our problem setting/testing panel started wondering whether this was too hard a problem for a Cook-Off. But thankfully, gojira proved them wrong.

Our very own Indian compatriot rudradevbasak broke into the top 10 in the last few minutes. This is the first appearance of an Indian in the Top 3 in Cook-Off’s. Way to go Rudradev. We wish you bring more glory to India in the ICPC world finals. And we also hope that other Indian participants follow suit.

In all, it was a brilliantly fought out contest and we thank all of you in making this Cook-Off a great success. We are further motivated to bring better problem sets for the next Cook-Off’s.

And the winners are…

1.) EgorK
2.) dzhulgakov
3.) rudradevbasak
4.) anton_lunyov
5.) Gassa
6.) petr
7.) lyrically
8.) raveman
9.) mmaxio
10.) al13n

The final Cook-Off rankings can we viewed here. Don’t forget to ask your questions directly to the problem setter here.

The short contest ratings have also been updated. gennady.korotkevich still rules the rank list even after a disappointing end to a glorious year. EgorK has closed in to both gennady and laycurse after his brilliant performance to end the year on a big high. What makes this performance special is that all the 4 higher rated players in this contest were participating and he still came on top. This performance has made him climb 2 places from 5th to 3rd! rudradevbasak is now ranked 22nd globally and 1st on the Indian rank list. Checkout where you stand before you start 2012 here.

That is all from us for now. We will be hosting our usual Long Contest at the start of the next month which incidentally also happens to be the beginning of a new calendar year.

Let me take this opportunity to wish each and everyone of you a Merry Christmas and a very Happy New Year on behalf of the entire CodeChef team.

Happy Holidays,
Tojo
Team CodeChef.

The December Long Contest for 2011 has concluded, and no prizes for guessing, we have a clear winner this time. Without any need of an introduction, Tiancheng Lou leads the pack for the second consecutive time. He has figured in the top 2 for seven times in this year and finishes the year on a high taking the top slot once again! It has also been a tremendous performance from Hirose from Japan, a first appearance in the top 10. Congratulations to both of them.

The Indian rank list has 16 contestants tied at the 7th position with many new faces in the top 20! For the first time Balajiganapathi has cracked the top 2 and in what a style! The second place deserves a special mention for being occupied by the relatively unknown but very promising Archit Karandikar from IIT Indore, closely followed by Anoop Chaurasiya. As with Balaji, this is their best performance till date on CodeChef and we hope that they only improve from here. Congratulations to both of them.

Needless to say all the excitement of the contest wouldn’t have been served had the dish not been cooked so well by our extremely talented problem setters and the very vigilant tester.

AnhDQ, Gennady Korotkevitch, Hiroto Sekido and Vamsi Kavala prepared the problems while the most reliable David Stolp sampled them before they were served to you.

The statistics and the final winners list follow:

Contest Statistics:

Not withstanding the difficult problem set, the participation improved quite a bit from the last time. This is encouraging. We will still be glad to know from the community if there is anything that we can do to improve participation more. Please give us the feedback on the quality and level of difficulty of the problems.

And now, here are the distinct winners for the December contest:

India:

1. balajiganapath
2. architk
3. imagin
4. udayrocks2k8
5. anshulgoyal
6. svm11
7. ashish.pant
7. balakrishnan_v
7. bittu_it
7. crazysaikat
7. dudechandan123
7. gurpreet_09
7. javadecoder
7. Johar
7. mcsharma1990
7. mng88
7. mukulgupta
7. navinag
7. saurabhmodi102000
7. sharatiitr
7. vaibhavbahl
7. xyler

Rest of the World:

1. ACRush
2. hirosegolf
3. gawry
4. iscsi
5. binon
6. pasin30055
7. hiphip
8. shindo
9. ushsh
10. success

That is all for now. Congratulations to all, once again.

If you haven’t yet checked out the editorials for this contest, you can do so here. Do not forget to pester the problem setter with all your doubts there. Yes they will answer each one of your questions directly.

We’re running a 2.5-hour Cook-off on Sunday, the 18th of December. It begins at 2130 hrs, so be there!

Cheers,
Team CodeChef.